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Did you know that Virginia used to be a gold mine, or at least contain a bunch of them? 19th century industry in the mountains of the western part of the state. We went to one of the mines back in the '60s or '70s and found peculiar bright-colored minerals in the spoil piles. If there was any gold, there wasn't enough to see. You can pan for gold still in the mountains of northeastern Alabama, but there used to be mines there. I wonder how much of the gold that was once in the Appalachian mountains was collected by native Americans before Europeans invaded. Probably not much, or our ancestors would have murdered them, like Columbus did in the Caribbean.